Southwest 737 Close Call At San Diego Airport Due To ATC Fumble

Conditional clearances are dangerous. This just proves it. But good luck trying to get the FAA to admit their practices do not meet international safety standards. Nope, the rest of the world must be wrong.

Yes at SAN Twr they are prone to give conditional landing clearences to a lot of aircraft at the same time, up to 5-6 aircraft are cleared to land nr x after xx
This is a bad practise and this incident is a prime example of why we dont dont do this in EASA land (EU)

For clarification, LUAW and concurrent landing clearances can only be issued at airports with ground radar, which alarms in the tower at a certain point. Not really sure the semantics/timing, but it's likely that the alarm is what eventually alerted the controller to send the jet around.

Also concur that it's strange the pilot was still preparing to land. Typically, I'd say any public concerns about ATC ability should be quelled by the Swiss Cheese model. Seems like this one had one more hole than usual.

When factoring the complexity and saturation of U.S airspace, we continue to be the safest country in the world.
Nine of the 10 busiest airports (by aircraft movement) are in the U.S. Some of our policy reflects this, as we may need to do things differently than the rest of the world in order to accomodate the higher demands of air traffic here.
Not to deny the added risk, just to say that the risk/reward ratio is likely adequate.

Guess I'm not following all the comments about conditional clearances. What I read is 4HV is cleared to land. Then 34H is cleared to LUAW. Where's the conditional instruction?

SAN has a displaced runway threshold of 1,800 feet, meaning arriving aircraft aim to touch down quite a bit further down the runway than where departing aircraft line up and wait. So at least there’s a bit of a safety margin built in for this kind of situation, not that it’s at all acceptable.

They're referring to how landing clearances are often delivered in the US. In the rest of the world, you will likely get your landing clearance on short final, when the runway is actually yours. In the US, they will issue your clearance early, and then continue using the runway until you're actually landing.

There's nothing communicated about a "conditional" clearance, but that's how it works out. ICAO clearance: the runway is yours, you may land. FAA clearance: I think the runway will be clear, and you may land unless I tell you otherwise.

Silly that Cessnas are landing there, use Brown field or any of the 3 less busy airports. Make the landing fee at Limbergh so restrictive that only major airlines can afford it. I remember watching from the windsock restaurant, above Jim's air, military jets using the only runway to make an emergency landing, causing an evergreen plane taxing on the only runway to go shooting across the infield and almost into the terminal, TRACON screwed up that one.

Part of the blame goes on the residents of San Diego.

Could've had a two runway airport with the Miramar swap.

I grew up and went to college in SAN, moving the airport has been a topic of controversy for decades. Truly a missed opportunity. and SAN is just about out of space to grow on Harbor Drive. Sad, the area deserves a much nicer airport.

Pilots who see an aircraft on the runway when on very short final should recognize the situation and execute a missed approach without being told by the controller. We all have to work together to ensure safety and prevent close calls that get media attention. The controller still will get dinged by their lapse of situational awareness however there was no good rational by the pilot to continue the approach when it was obviously not going to work. I've saved the butts of many pilots catching errors and pilots should do the same. It's a team effort.

While conditional clearances (if that’s what is actually called) are rare in the rest of the world, I assume if executed effectively, does increase efficiency with more aircraft landing and departing from the runway without needing additional runways. However, they clearly haven’t executed it effectively, hence no one else but the U.S. regularly relies on it.

It's not actually called a conditional clearance.

Ironically, in many other places around the world, they have actual "conditional" clearances, while the U.S does not. For instance, some places can instruct a plane to line up and wait behind landing traffic. In the U.S, that's not allowed. Presumable we restrict this because of the potential disaster if the pilot misses the conditional portion of the clearance.

The military did not want to give up Miramar. The residents around Miramar did not want a commercial airport there.

She needs to fired to set an example to others who become incompetent at their job.

You've earned the giant eye-roll award, Tom!
Nobody here has enough information about the situation to decipher whether the controller was "incompetent." The things I've heard within the industry suggest the opposite.
Also, the consequences of firing anyone in an already dangerously understaffed field... that may end up getting people killed more quickly than if we just let less-than-perfect people keep working. So there's that.